Best at Everything? It’s Closer to True

There is a comforting adage that many players on the football team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology regularly use among themselves: The game on Saturday is the easiest part of their week.

It makes sense considering that the quarterback, Peter Williams, is studying, actually, to be a rocket scientist. Or that the senior linebacker Cameron Wagar, a mechanical engineering major, last week endured a review of a semester-long group project on Monday, a biology report due Wednesday and a biology exam Friday, just before the team bus left for Bangor, Me., where the undefeated Engineers faced Husson University in the first round of the N.C.A.A. Division III playoffs.

And so football indeed seems like a party, Wagar said, even when it is fourth-and-the-season, with 51 seconds left in the program’s first postseason appearance, and Wagar’s defense needs to make a stop, as it did Saturday in an eventual 27-20 overtime victory.

That, maybe more than anything else, could explain how one of the premier research institutes in the world — which counts 32 Nobel Prize winners, 47 Rhodes scholars, and 4 of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon during the Apollo program as alumni — has added another activity to the list of those it excels at.

While Stanford proudly refers to itself as Nerd Nation, and Harvard just completed its third unbeaten season since 2001, the success of M.I.T. (10-0 this season) represents something of a eureka moment for those who think brains and brawn cannot harmoniously commingle.

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Cameron Wagar, a senior linebacker for M.I.T., is a mechanical engineering major.CreditDavid Silverman

Although M.I.T.’s athletic director, Julie Soriero, acknowledged there were pockets of students and faculty who “still don’t know we have athletic programs on our campus,” a majority of the community has rallied around the Engineers, including L. Rafael Reif, the institute’s president, who delivered a rallying speech to the team on the bus last week.

“He wished us luck,” Williams said, “and said, ‘Get it done.’ ”

There is an expectation of excellence associated with everything at M.I.T., according to Chad Martinovich, the sixth-year coach. That is natural for a university that accepted fewer than 8 percent of 18,000-plus applicants this year.

“I don’t think any of these kids are playing football to be average,” Martinovich said. “They don’t do anything to be average.”

Unlike members of the Ivy League, M.I.T. does not measure prospective athletes by an Academic Index, which summarizes each player’s high school grade point average and scores on standardized tests and then produces a number, typically between 170 and 240, that determines whether that player can be admitted.

M.I.T.’s recruits, like all of its students, are vetted by an admissions department that stacks up each class against itself, not against past classes. That means there is no baseline S.A.T. score or class ranking that will secure admission. The institute, like all Division III colleges, does not award athletic scholarships.

So coaches must cast a wide net. Learning this concept took time, according to Martinovich, who was previously the defensive coordinator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. If only 8 percent of applicants get in, finding ones that can also play football — and juggle athletics with academics — is much more challenging.

Despite that, Martinovich said he managed to increase his team’s depth from about 40 dressed players on game days to around 70.

“There was a good core of talent when I got here,” Martinovich said. “There just wasn’t enough of it.”

M.I.T., which plays at Wesley College in Dover, Del., on Saturday, has a football history that stretches to 1881, but in 1901, the students voted to disband the program. M.I.T. remained a campus without football until 1978, when a group of students formed a club team. M.I.T. finally entered the N.C.A.A.’s Division III under Coach Dwight Smith with a 29-7 win over Stonehill in 1988.

Over the next 20 years, the Engineers went 64-115-1 under Smith, never finishing higher than second in the Eastern Collegiate Football Conference or third in the New England Football Conference and never reaching any postseason. (Smith retired in 2008.)

Soriero interviewed five candidates for the job opening, eventually settling on Martinovich. But he struggled at first. The Engineers finished 1-8 his first season, losing by an average of 15.7 points a game. Soriero recalled meeting a recruit and his family that spring and shakily voicing confidence in Martinovich.

“I remember walking out of the room and thinking, Boy, I hope I’m right,” she said.

After winning one game in 2010 and two in 2011, the Engineers clinched their first winning season since 1999, and followed with a 6-3 year in 2013. It was viewed as a huge success, but the upperclassmen were not satisfied.

They made T-shirts during the summer that read, “It’s Time,” on the back, referring to their collective goal: Win the league. The same type of tight games they lost last year they won this time around, beating Western New England University, 35-34, and edging Endicott College, 34-29, for the first time in team history.

The Engineers worked their magic again Saturday at Husson, where they found themselves with the ball, down by 3, with 48 seconds left and no timeouts. The call was to spread the field, bringing even the tailback out of the backfield, leaving Williams with multiple vertical routes to choose from. He connected with Brad Goldsberry over the middle for 29 yards, setting up a game-tying field goal.

Not surprisingly, the play had been installed that Wednesday at practice and had never been run before in a game.

“We can throw a lot at them, and they memorize a lot in terms of verbiage and signals,” Martinovich said. “You can throw a lot of schemes at them and they can retain that.”

But, he added quickly, that was not the only reason the play had worked.

“They’re very good football players,” he said. “And they take this aspect of their lives very seriously.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Best at Everything? It’s Closer to True. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe